In this house it’s all creativty, all the time

Small scrappies = big scarf

Do you keep your left over yarn? What do you do with it? Charity hats/blankets? Striped something or other? Really big game of Cat’s Cradle? Tie the kids up with it? Some leftovers I don’t mind using up just as string or a craft supply for Punky. Some is too nice for that, so I put it away, going to use it for SOMETHING you know. I love using up my leftovers, I really do. I feel a bigger sense of accomplishment doing that than I do releasing a new pattern (new pattern are a lot of work, by the end I just feel tired and not wanting to look at it any more). And you know I’m all about the colour – the more colours the better. SO, a scrap busting project that lets you throw colours around – I am so in. Go take a look at this, see what you think. I know, I know the first reaction is often “are you CRAZY?” – or was yours (as mine) “that’s AWESOME!” I was not interested in making mine out of sock yarn scraps – although you know I have a metric tonne of them. I wanted to use up my heavier stuff. Yarn that I loved but didn’t have enough to make much with. So I dragged it all out and tossed it in this old fish bowl.

I borrowed an 8mm zillion inch long circular needle from Sarah and started to cast on. Now the pattern gives approximate length for a sock yarn scarf. Obviously a worsted scarf would need fewer stitches to achive the same length. I did a little gauge swatch, did a bit of math, cast on the number of sts the math said to… and then cast on some more. I didn’t want it to be too short. (HAHAHA) In the end I decided to use 400 sts. I was concerned that 300 wouldn’t be quite as long as I was hoping, and anything over 400 just seemed crazy-making. 400 somehow seemed reasonable, if you understand reasonable to mean crazy, but not super 500 st crazy. Yeah.

It takes a while for the stitch pattern to show up on this one. Maybe an inch? This picture shows when I first thought it didn’t look too terrible.

Here it is all curled up on the needle. Can you tell how long it will be? Me either.

Messing with the colours is part of the fun of this scarf. You can try to plan it out so one stripe blends into the next, or you can just randomly pull stuff out of your pile and stripe away. Because you are using so many colours you don’t need to worry about things matching. I did a bit of both – I have some nicely blended stripes and some where a colour just caught my eye. I did have some neutrals in the bowl, so I tried to space them out, use them as a spacer between other colours. I didn’t want a giant beige stripe in there (shudders). The stitch you use is called Linen Stitch.

It uses slip stitches to create the colour blending effect.

It’s a reversible stitch too. It doesn’t look the same on the back, but it is nice and nubbly.